Reddit reviews The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
We found 14 Reddit comments about The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
I'm trying desperately to find a post on /r/anthropology debunking this completely. It sites the range of people who are raped, how they are raped, how much force is used, and all sorts of things and essentially says that the notion that it's not about sex is absurd, and that myth is repeated not because it's true, but because that's what supposedly helps rape victims. I'll continue to try and look for it.
A woman who's a good friend of mine was raped and she let the guy go, and I wasn't there to help her until too long after, so this post resonates with me and my fury about what happened.
Edit: Found it. It took me so long because it was deleted.
Everything below is from this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropology/comments/mbvsg/the_rapeisnotaboutsex_doctrine_will_go_down_in/
----
Wikipedia:
> Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
----
Excerpts from chapter 18 of "The Blank Slate" (PDF):
> When the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published A Natural History of Rape in 2000, they threatened a consensus that had held firm in intellectual life for a quarter of a century, and they brought down more condemnation on evolutionary psychology than any issue had in years. Rape is a painful issue to write about, but also an unavoidable one. Nowhere else in modern intellectual life is the denial of human nature more passionately insisted upon, and nowhere else is the alternative more deeply misunderstood. Clarifying these issues, I believe, would go a long way toward reconciling three ideals that have needlessly been put into conflict: women's rights, a biologically informed understanding of human nature, and common sense.
> The horror of rape gives it a special gravity in our understanding of the psychology of men and women. There is an overriding moral imperative in the study of rape: to reduce its occurrence. Any scientist who illuminates the causes of rape deserves our admiration, like a medical researcher who illuminates the cause of a disease, because understanding an affliction is the first step toward eliminating it. And since no one acquires the truth by divine revelation, we must also respect those who explore theories that may turn out to be incorrect. Moral criticism would seem to be in order only for those who would enforce dogmas, ignore evidence, or shut down research, because they would be protecting their reputations at the expense of victims of rapes that might not have occurred if we understood the phenomenon better.
...
> Brownmiller's theory went well beyond the moral principle that women have a right not to be sexually assaulted. It said that rape had nothing to do with an individual man's desire for sex but was a tactic by which the entire male gender oppressed the entire female gender. In her famous words:
> Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function ... it is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.
> This grew into the modern catechism: rape is not about sex, our culture socializes men to rape, it glorifies violence against women. The analysis comes right out of the gender-feminist theory of human nature: people are blank slates (who must be trained or socialized to want things); the only significant human motive is power (so sexual desire is irrelevant); and all motives and interests must be located in groups (such as the male sex and the female sex) rather than in individual people.
> The Brownmiller theory is appealing even to people who are not gender feminists because of the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Since the 1960s most educated people have come to believe that sex should be thought of as natural, not shameful or dirty. Sex is good because sex is natural and natural things are good. But rape is bad; therefore, rape is not about sex. The motive to rape must come from social institutions, not from anything in human nature.
> The violence-not-sex slogan is right about two things. Both parts are absolutely true for the victim: a woman who is raped experiences it as a violent assault, not as a sexual act. And the part about violence is true for the perpetrator by definition: if there is no violence or coercion, we do not call it rape. But the fact that rape has something to do with violence does not mean it has nothing to do with sex, any more than the fact that armed robbery has something to do with violence means it has nothing to do with greed. Evil men may use violence to get sex, just as they use violence to get other things they want.
> I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.
...
> there is an impressive body of evidence (reviewed more thoroughly by the legal scholar Owen Jones than by Thornhill and Palmer) that the motives for rape overlap with the motives for sex:
> Coerced copulation is widespread among species in the animal kingdom, suggesting that it is not selected against and may sometimes be selected for. It is found in many species of insects, birds, and mammals, including our relatives the orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees.
Rape is found in all human societies.
> Rapists generally apply as much force as is needed to coerce the victim into sex. They rarely inflict a serious or fatal injury, which would preclude conception and birth. Only 4 percent of rape victims sustain serious injuries, and fewer than one in five hundred is murdered.
> Victims of rape are mostly in the peak reproductive years for women, between thirteen and thirty-five, with a mean in most data sets of twenty-four. Though many rape victims are classified as children (under the age of sixteen), most of these are adolescents, with a median age of fourteen. The age distribution is very different from that of victims of other violent crimes, and is the opposite of what would happen if rape victims were picked for their physical vulnerability or by their likelihood of holding positions of power.
Victims of rape are more traumatized when the rape can result in a conception. It is most psychologically painful for women in their fertile years, and for victims of forced intercourse as opposed to other forms of rape.
> Rapists are not demographically representative of the male gender. They are overwhelmingly young men, the age of the most intense sexual competitiveness. The young males who allegedly have been socialized to rape mysteriously lose that socialization as they get older.
> Though most rapes do not result in conception, many do. About 5 percent of rape victims of reproductive age become pregnant, resulting in more than 32,000 rape-related pregnancies in the United States each year. (That is why abortion in the case of rape is a significant issue.) The proportion would have been even higher in prehistory, when women did not use long-term contraception." Brownmiller wrote that biological theories of rape are fanciful because in terms of reproductive strategy, the hit or miss ejaculations of a single-strike rapist are a form of Russian roulette compared to ongoing consensual mating. " But ongoing consensual mating is not an option for every male, and dispositions that resulted in hit-or-miss sex could be evolutionarily more successful than dispositions that resulted in no sex at all. Natural selection can operate effectively with small reproductive advantages, as little as 1 percent.
> The payoff for a reality-based understanding of rape is the hope of reducing or eliminating it. Given the theories on the table, the possible sites for levers of influence include violence, sexist attitudes, and sexual desire.
-----
Thoughts?
-----
"The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" on Amazon
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0670031518
Maybe I'm just out of the loop of what's in vogue with psychologists then. For an opinion published for a general audience, it did seem out of balance.
This reminds me of the book I read a few years back called The Blank Slate which describes almost the opposite bias among many in the social sciences, a die-hard opposition to the idea that many things are influenced by human nature, or even of the existence of human nature, by people who try to explain every aspect of our feelings and behaviour as if they were purely social constructs.
What did you think about the 2nd paragraph, with the 'I'm not a beast, I'm a human' business? Is he in denial about being a mammal? Or, since human carries many connotations that Homo sapien does not, was he implying a point he didn't wish to openly state or defend?
http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0670031518
We all hear that a lot, but it's simply not an empirical truth, and it's outdated. That's something they teach rape victims to console them, it's not an absolute fact. And there's no shortage of evidence disputing it and showing that rape has a lot to do with sex. Castration absolutely has an impact on sexual violence, even if you believe that most rape is non-sexual. For example:
Wikipedia:
> Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
----
Excerpts from chapter 18 of "The Blank Slate" (PDF):
> When the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published A Natural History of Rape in 2000, they threatened a consensus that had held firm in intellectual life for a quarter of a century, and they brought down more condemnation on evolutionary psychology than any issue had in years. Rape is a painful issue to write about, but also an unavoidable one. Nowhere else in modern intellectual life is the denial of human nature more passionately insisted upon, and nowhere else is the alternative more deeply misunderstood. Clarifying these issues, I believe, would go a long way toward reconciling three ideals that have needlessly been put into conflict: women's rights, a biologically informed understanding of human nature, and common sense.
> The horror of rape gives it a special gravity in our understanding of the psychology of men and women. There is an overriding moral imperative in the study of rape: to reduce its occurrence. Any scientist who illuminates the causes of rape deserves our admiration, like a medical researcher who illuminates the cause of a disease, because understanding an affliction is the first step toward eliminating it. And since no one acquires the truth by divine revelation, we must also respect those who explore theories that may turn out to be incorrect. Moral criticism would seem to be in order only for those who would enforce dogmas, ignore evidence, or shut down research, because they would be protecting their reputations at the expense of victims of rapes that might not have occurred if we understood the phenomenon better.
...
> Brownmiller's theory went well beyond the moral principle that women have a right not to be sexually assaulted. It said that rape had nothing to do with an individual man's desire for sex but was a tactic by which the entire male gender oppressed the entire female gender. In her famous words:
> Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function ... it is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.
> This grew into the modern catechism: rape is not about sex, our culture socializes men to rape, it glorifies violence against women. The analysis comes right out of the gender-feminist theory of human nature: people are blank slates (who must be trained or socialized to want things); the only significant human motive is power (so sexual desire is irrelevant); and all motives and interests must be located in groups (such as the male sex and the female sex) rather than in individual people.
> The Brownmiller theory is appealing even to people who are not gender feminists because of the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Since the 1960s most educated people have come to believe that sex should be thought of as natural, not shameful or dirty. Sex is good because sex is natural and natural things are good. But rape is bad; therefore, rape is not about sex. The motive to rape must come from social institutions, not from anything in human nature.
> The violence-not-sex slogan is right about two things. Both parts are absolutely true for the victim: a woman who is raped experiences it as a violent assault, not as a sexual act. And the part about violence is true for the perpetrator by definition: if there is no violence or coercion, we do not call it rape. But the fact that rape has something to do with violence does not mean it has nothing to do with sex, any more than the fact that armed robbery has something to do with violence means it has nothing to do with greed. Evil men may use violence to get sex, just as they use violence to get other things they want.
> I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.
...
> there is an impressive body of evidence (reviewed more thoroughly by the legal scholar Owen Jones than by Thornhill and Palmer) that the motives for rape overlap with the motives for sex:
> Coerced copulation is widespread among species in the animal kingdom, suggesting that it is not selected against and may sometimes be selected for. It is found in many species of insects, birds, and mammals, including our relatives the orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees.
Rape is found in all human societies.
> Rapists generally apply as much force as is needed to coerce the victim into sex. They rarely inflict a serious or fatal injury, which would preclude conception and birth. Only 4 percent of rape victims sustain serious injuries, and fewer than one in five hundred is murdered.
> Victims of rape are mostly in the peak reproductive years for women, between thirteen and thirty-five, with a mean in most data sets of twenty-four. Though many rape victims are classified as children (under the age of sixteen), most of these are adolescents, with a median age of fourteen. The age distribution is very different from that of victims of other violent crimes, and is the opposite of what would happen if rape victims were picked for their physical vulnerability or by their likelihood of holding positions of power.
Victims of rape are more traumatized when the rape can result in a conception. It is most psychologically painful for women in their fertile years, and for victims of forced intercourse as opposed to other forms of rape.
> Rapists are not demographically representative of the male gender. They are overwhelmingly young men, the age of the most intense sexual competitiveness. The young males who allegedly have been socialized to rape mysteriously lose that socialization as they get older.
> Though most rapes do not result in conception, many do. About 5 percent of rape victims of reproductive age become pregnant, resulting in more than 32,000 rape-related pregnancies in the United States each year. (That is why abortion in the case of rape is a significant issue.) The proportion would have been even higher in prehistory, when women did not use long-term contraception." Brownmiller wrote that biological theories of rape are fanciful because in terms of reproductive strategy, the hit or miss ejaculations of a single-strike rapist are a form of Russian roulette compared to ongoing consensual mating. " But ongoing consensual mating is not an option for every male, and dispositions that resulted in hit-or-miss sex could be evolutionarily more successful than dispositions that resulted in no sex at all. Natural selection can operate effectively with small reproductive advantages, as little as 1 percent.
> The payoff for a reality-based understanding of rape is the hope of reducing or eliminating it. Given the theories on the table, the possible sites for levers of influence include violence, sexist attitudes, and sexual desire.
"The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" on Amazon
One of my favorites is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.
No.
Read a book. May I suggest:
How the Mind Works
Consciousness Explained
The Crucible of Conscoiusness
The Astonishing Hypothesis
The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature
I'm not going to respond to your insults since you have confused me for someone else, but since you are so righteous about commanding to people what they must read in order to have an opinion on this topic, I might suggest some reading for you as well.
Seriously though, all readings and topics aside, you are being incredibly rude and arrogant here. I suggest toning it down and having a civilized conversation with people you disagree with if your goal is to increase the amount of accurate knowledge in the world and not just to throw put-downs at people that you have categorically discarded.
And when we talk about the brain, human abilities and differences between races we step on the toes of humanists and leftists.
Wikipedia describes Darwinism as:
> Darwinism is a term used for various movements or concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or evolution, including ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin.[1][2][3] The meaning of Darwinism has changed over time, and varies depending on who is using the term.[4] In modern usage, particularly in the United States, Darwinism is often used by creationists as a pejorative term...
> However, Darwinism is also used neutrally within the scientific community to distinguish modern evolutionary theories from those first proposed by Darwin, as well as by historians to differentiate it from other evolutionary theories from around the same period. For example, Darwinism may be used to refer to Darwin's proposed mechanism of natural selection, in comparison to more recent mechanisms such as genetic drift and gene flow. It may also refer specifically to the role of Charles Darwin as opposed to others in the history of evolutionary thought — particularly contrasting Darwin's results with those of earlier theories such as Lamarckism or later ones such as the modern synthesis....
> In the United Kingdom the term retains its positive sense as a reference to natural selection, and for example Richard Dawkins wrote in his collection of essays A Devil's Chaplain, published in 2003, that as a scientist he is a Darwinist
So it is used and understood in different ways by different people. I am an evolutionary creationist (who studies Biology) myself so I don't have a problem with Darwinism per se (though I reject metaphysical Darwinism as commonly advanced by atheists).
Further there are very good reasons think that our moral faculty is genetic in origin just as our faculty for language is. You are clearly not very familiar with the current scientific views on these subjects. I suggest you acquaint yourself with it. A good book on this subject is Steven Pinkers' The Blank Slate - http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0670031518 (of course as a theist I don't agree that our moral faculty is only the product of natural selection).
All combined research to date.
Also see this:
> This is an idea that few serious science supports anymore
This is untrue. Many notable neuroscientists have long documented the structural, chemical, and behavioral differences in the brains of boys and girls. In fact, one study by Simon Baron-Cohen (the cousin of this guy) found that infant boys and girls react differently to their environments.
He studied one day old infants and learned that boys will look longer at objects but shorter at faces; conversely girls will look longer at faces, and shorter at objects. There is zero chance that this behavioral difference is the result of socialization.
A not dissimilar phenomenon is observable in chimpanzees, too. Male chimps will play with tool-like toys and largely ignore baby dolls, while the female chimps often are disinterested in the tool-toys but will spend large amounts of time nurturing and caring for the baby dolls.
Further, Steven Pinker wrote an entire book about the fallacy of what is often called the "Blank Slate Theory"; concluding that, while environment does play a role, biology is by orders of magnitude more influential on human behavior.
Even in countries like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, some of the most gender egalitarian societies on planet Earth, you still find that jobs like engineering contain mostly men, and jobs like nursing contain mostly women. A documentary was even made on this surprising finding.
Finally, a recent article in the Telegraph cites a study which says that this false narrative of male/female neuro-equivalence is putting women's health at risk.
To quote an interviewed scientist in the article, "the last two decades had proven the assumption [that men and women are neurologically the same] as false, false, false."
Male and female brains are different. The science is very conclusive on this.
> The wage gap isn't real
The gap does exist, of course. It is the reason why it exists that they disagree with. The media will tell you its sexism, Paeger (and the actual Dept of Labor report) will tell you its primarily life choices & biology.
Absolutely, but while libertarians have ideals they promote, and I want a smaller more effective government with less of the stupid rules and regulations also, it's only because libertarians have lived in a society with social protections that allowed them the freedom to think that their version would be better; unfortunately, it's also a fantasy land.
Humans can be greedy bigoted bastards, because they are human. But not all of them are, and the world is getting better, slowly, because of democracy's and government protections.
I just hope we don't get dragged back into feudal empires by religious zealots, as they sure are trying.
http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0670031518